Big East notebook: Final stretch has meaning for all teams

As much as any coach on the weekly Big East conference call, Marquette’s Buzz Williams will reference what the media are saying about his Golden Eagles.

Matt Stout

As much as any coach on the weekly Big East conference call, Marquette’s Buzz Williams will reference what the media are saying about his Golden Eagles.

First, after his team streaked out to 9-0 start in Big East play, people only wanted to talk about its "light" schedule. Now, as Marquette’s fighting for a top-four seed and a double-bye in the conference tournament, it’s all about the toughness of the next series of games.

“I thought the first 13 games were really hard on us,” he said before his team’s 78-72 win over Georgetown on Saturday, which moved the Golden Eagles to 23-4 (12-2 Big East). “Maybe that’s just because I view it in a different way.”

With the Hoyas out of the way, No. 10 Marquette will host No. 1 UConn on Wednesday before visiting No. 7 Louisville and No. 4 Pittsburgh, the other two teams joining it atop the standings. The Golden Eagles finish their season at home against Syracuse.

And with nothing essentially settled in the league, the final stretch has (expectedly) become crucial for several teams, no matter what position they’re in. Marquette just happens to be in one of the most discussed.

“We try not to be prophets, we try not to be fortune tellers,” Williams said. “We just try to go to work every day.”

There’s still a lot left to do.

Notre Dame

Mike Brey doesn’t dance around it. The Dance is a long shot.

“Talking about the NCAA tournament seems a little far-fetched for us right now,” the Notre Dame coach said. “We’re just trying to get a road league win.”

It’s surely been a struggle for the Fighting Irish, who continued their attempt of salvaging their season Saturday with a 103-84 win over Providence.

At 15-11 (6-8 in the league), Notre Dame tumbled out of the national picture after a seven-game losing streak engulfed most of its January and February, and even if it finishes with victories over Rutgers, UConn, Villanova and St. John’s, it’s still hardly a lock.

But Brey, the realist, spoke more of building momentum entering the Big East tournament than an NCAA tournament-worthy resume.

“There have been teams that have been 7-9 and under .500 who have gotten bids lately out of really good leagues,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any question, I don’t think anyone would argue, a 9-9 regular-season record in our league (is respectable). There are different 9-9s in our league. Like a 9-9 (record) playing the ‘A’ TV schedule is maybe different than (another) 9-9. That’s the pressure on the committee now. And we’re not that only league doing that.”

Some of the most basic criteria that determine NCAA tournament teams don’t favor the Irish, though. Entering Saturday, they had an RPI of 75 and a strength-of-schedule rating that trailed eight of the 10 teams ahead of them in the league standings to start the day.

Pittsburgh

The Pittsburgh Panthers doesn’t have too many questions being asked of them following a week in which they beat No. 1 UConn and dismantled DePaul, 80-61, on Saturday.

But the one reporters love to ask is one coach Jamie Dixon isn’t ready to answer. Could this be the best Pittsburgh team ever?

“I’ve said all along this team could be as good as any team we’ve had,” said Dixon, whose team had never beaten a top-ranked team before Monday’s 76-68 win in Hartford. “Obviously a lot of people are talking about us a little bit differently at this point. But we recognize that it’s one game. We seem to anoint teams after one game, especially when it’s on national TV.”

Spoken like a man who knows not to get too high, too soon. Even though the Panthers own the league’s longest active streak of NCAA tournament appearances with seven, they’ve never advanced past the Sweet 16 in that span, making it that far four times.

There’s a belief this could year be different. DeJuan Blair, he of 22 points and 23 rebounds last Monday, has developed into one of the country’s most feared big men, and Levance Fields, the conference leader in assists and assist-to-turnover ratio, is one of its “most underrated guards,” according to Rutgers coach Fred Hill.

“Is it their best team they’ve had in the last how many years of the great run that they’ve had?” Hill asked. “I think time will tell and see how they finish up at the end of the year.”

DePaul

One thing can put Jerry Wainwright into a bad mood.

“I go into these throes of depression,” the coach said jokingly. “All you have to do is watch game film of our league.”

The tape will show a DePaul team just trying to survive. The league’s only winless team in conference play, the Blue Demons fell to 8-19, 0-14 after Saturday’s loss to Pitt.

In trying to avoid joining the 1993-94 Miami Hurricanes (0-18) as the only team to ever go winless in conference play, DePaul finishes with Villanova and St. John’s at home before traveling to West Virginia and Georgetown.

“The negativity and the pressure these kids feel by being winless, we have to somehow get that out of their mind,” Wainwright said. “It’s always going to be present. You want something so bad, sometimes it gets in the way of you dealing with it.

“Our team doesn’t recognize, I think, how important each game is to the other team,” he said. “And when you have, other than three teams, only one shot at somebody, that game is of extreme importance. We’ve been a little bit, in all honesty, awed by the fact that everybody comes at us like they would a first division team. You can’t stumble.”